Proposal: Migrate General Discussion to the top-level Communities group

One thing I think is important here is how clear the proposed structure will be to new members joining the forum: I think it's important that newcomers can easily understand the purpose of each group, where they should start a discussion, where to find relevant conversations etc. If we move towards using the parent "Communities" group for cross-community discussions and the sub-communities for day-to-day community discussions, then this distinction should be made very explicit.

Perhaps we should consider adding a short description or guidance when people join, explaining the structure and intended use of each group. I think getting this right will help avoid confusion and make the platform easier to navigate.

– Nikolas

If the Communities group would be moderated and accessible for posting only for delegates or admins, then closing the General Discussion is IMO really inappropriate as this is the only forum where everybody can post freely.

I took part in the advisory committees discussion behind this proposal and support it.

The communities exist so that each group can tell us what it needs. This was the design discussed with committee members and community representatives at the F2F meetings in May 2025 and May 2026. Before the communities, the practical way to influence the project was through code and pull requests. A single shared room tends to work the same way. Most General Discussion threads are library engineering and project policy, carried by maintainers and long-time contributors. That discussion matters. Its place is Committers and Individuals, or the top-level group when it concerns several communities. It does not tell us what Small Businesses or Distributions need.

The Windows installer followed a Small Businesses poll in June 2025:

https://openssl-communities.org/d/hLGryc76/openssl-library-binary-distributions-and-installers-for-microsoft-windows-poll

The FIPS_mode() macro started as a Distributions thread in March, went through a community poll and the TAC, and was approved by the OpenSSL Corporation Board in May:

https://openssl-communities.org/d/HMLPnYAk/bringing-back-fips_mode-define

https://openssl-communities.org/d/wKIACrlB/board-approval-request-reinstate-the-fips_mode-macro

The installer release was announced in General Discussion, and the Small Businesses poll still has no outcome. I will post it there.

@Tomas Mraz : nobody loses the ability to post. Every member can start a thread in their own community, and Individuals is open to everyone. What changes is where a thread starts. A thread that concerns more than one community is moved to the top-level group on request to a committee member or a community manager, within two working days. Everyone can reply there.

@Nikolas Gauder : agreed. Each group gets a short description: who it is for, what belongs there, and where cross-community topics go. The procedures that are the same for everyone (joining a community, delegates, nominations, raising a cross-community topic) move to one guides group, linked from every description. Community managers maintain it, and members can ask questions under each guide. Does that split work for you?

@Anton Arapov We will have to agree to disagree on this topic. I have nowhere said that the separate communities discussions are bad thing. They are very much useful and I know the good outcome of having them. However not having a common discussion forum where everyone can post IMO just leads to fragmentation of some of the discussion topics which are not community-specific. And Individual community IMO should not be misused for such thing, especially given not everybody is there (although everybody can be there, if they want).

@Tomas Mraz : you did not argue against the communities, and my reply did not address your point. I agree that Individuals should not become the general forum. Nobody is asked to post cross-community topics there.

The shared room is moderated on one point: who creates a new thread. Once a thread exists, everyone can read it and reply.

How it works:

1. Communities. Day-to-day discussion and polls stay in Academics, Committers, Distributions, Individuals, Large Businesses and Small Businesses. A new member starts there.

2. Shared room. The top-level group replaces General Discussion. Everyone is a member by default. Its scope is topics that concern more than one community, or none in particular.

3. New threads. Community managers and BAC, TAC and FAC members create them.

4. Requests. Any member can ask for a new thread in a pinned request thread in the shared room, or through any committee member. A request is answered within two working days. It is declined only when the topic belongs to one community or duplicates an open thread, and the answer says where it goes.

5. Decisions. Where each community's view matters, the poll runs in each community and the results are posted in the shared thread.

6. Review. After three months we publish requests received, time to open, and threads, replies and new posters per room, and review this rule against the data.

A topic that is not community-specific gets one thread in one place. A committee member or a community manager opens it.

Everyone is a member of the shared room, so every new thread reaches everyone. The limit on new threads keeps that room low-volume and keeps day-to-day discussion in the communities. Large open spaces lose participants as volume grows, and small named groups hold newcomers better. No single community meets every need, which is why the shared room exists. Large rooms keep their quality when they are moderated. A group stays alive through messages exchanged and new people joining, not through member count.

We did our research two years back, when we suggested rules. References:

- Jones, Ravid, Rafaeli (2004), overload in large groups: https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.1040.0023

- Ren et al. (2012), named subgroups and newcomers: https://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol36/iss3/11

- Morgan, Halfaker (2018), a hosted room for newcomers: https://opensym.org/blog/2020/01/22/evaluating-the-impact-of-the-wikipedia-teahouse-on-newcomer-socialization-and-retention

- Hwang, Foote (2021), why small communities persist: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.04282

- TeBlunthuis et al. (2022), no community can do everything: https://doi.org/10.1145/3512908

- Lin et al. (2017), large communities under moderation: https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/14884

- Raban, Moldovan, Jones (2010), what predicts survival: https://doi.org/10.1145/1718918.1718932

- CNCF End User Community, a stakeholder group with its own forums and advisory board: https://www.cncf.io/about/end-user-community

So they idea is to restrict the general (collective of communities, "global", call it what you will) conversation to the same sort of construct as the advisory boards.

Yeah ok, I suppose this addresses a perceived cacophony if the more anarchic "everyone in the square" (although, I haven't really experienced that here... yet). But, it's at the cost of delegates' time and energy, 'cause they will have to hold the same conversation twice, once with the community members and once with each other.

I'm afraid, like @tomas, that this risks ending up with the same fragmentation we saw that caused General Discussions to be created in the first place.

That being said, I don't know, I cannot predict the future. If this can be reverted later if it turns out to have a more negative than positive outcome, I can see myself trying, in spite of my apprehensions.